Dr. Thom Mayer
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Dr. Thom Mayer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Met my wife Maureen there. She was a newborn ICU flight nurse. I was a pediatric trauma fellow. Just a magical series of serendipitous circumstances.
People ask me all the time, how do I build my resume to get a job like yours as the medical director of the NFL Players Association? And my answer is, I became the medical director on August 1st, 2001. Corey Stringer, a tackle for the Vikings, died inexplicably of heat stroke. And I got a phone call. The phone call was from Gene Upshaw, then the executive director of the NFLPA.
And he called me not because he had done a resume search, but he called me because we were best friends. And we were best friends because his youngest and my youngest were best friends. Our families had had countless dinners. We coached tee ball together. We coached football together. And so he called me because he knew me and he trusted me.
So I always tell people, don't build resumes, build relationships. And I think that's the key, particularly as we move forward. And so I've been doing that for the last 23 plus years. And it's been an honor and a privilege to be a part of guiding the health and safety of our 2,500 players per year.
You know, when our boys were younger, I used to take them to school every day I was in town. When I dropped them off, I always said precisely the same thing. One more step in the journey of discovering where your deep joy intersects the world's deep needs. I swear I said this to them. You have to start with your deep joy, not the world's deep needs. The world's There's no bottom to that well.
But if you start with your deep joy, with passion that drives you, why you do what you do. And that has been a constant in the job because, you know, Lord Acton said, as you know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. NFL is now, was then in 2001. the most powerful sports organization in their business in the world.
And keeping in mind that the deep joy of representing the health and safety needs of our 2,500 player patients, that's not the same interest as the NFL, which represents the interest of 32 billionaires who are the owners of the clubs. And so, you know, you just have to be willing to stay constant to that.
It was true in the concussion crisis when we recognized there was a problem that had to be fixed. We, the NFLPA, Sean Sansevieria, our attorney at the time, and I wrote the original concussion protocols. And there was significant pushback from the NFL, different commissioner and different medical director and chair of what was then called the MTBI committee. We stayed constant to that.
And now, you know, we're at a place where the league takes great pride in calling them the NFL concussion protocols. That's great, as long as it's for the good of my player patients. But having the courage, the integrity to stand up and say, no, we are going to have guidelines. And these are the scientific protocols that are our best knowledge at this time.
The book, as you know, is kind of a litany, very brief, 176 pages of contrarian types of statements, starting with the title, Leadership is Worthless, but Leading is Priceless. What I learned at 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine. You know, when I was called to the Pentagon on 9-11, I was a command physician at the And I got there.
First of all, you fly in and you think, my God, these are the gates of hell. I mean, you see the Pentagon of all things burning. You know, couldn't even see that there was any remnants of a plane and the southwest wall was completely on fire. But the gates of hell take you to some pretty interesting places. And so what I learned was that, first of all, it was a civilian operation.
I was the medical director of the local EMS agency and the chairman of the emergency department. But I had 32 generals standing behind me, facing the Pentagon, willing to help in any way. Good men, good women who were there to help me any way they could. But I realized I'm not going to get anywhere by sucking up to these generals.
I have to suck down to the people actually doing the work, to the structural engineers, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to the paramedics, to the firefighters, to the suppressant folks, to the FBI evidence recovery team, in order to secure that building so we could safely, they could safely get into the building.
To help rescue those who were in there or recover those who had not made it through the horrific crash. And I think that's true in all of our lives. We kind of suck up guests. I always say the boss is someone who thinks that he's the most important person in the room, whereas the leader.
knows that her job is to make sure that everyone else feels that they're the most important person in the room. No need to suck up. We need to suck down and discover the answers within us.
Yeah, shortly after I first started my job, I had a very difficult issue with the NFL. And I laid the issue out. And I knew that I can't just say, hey, boss, solve this problem for me. I had to come in with solutions. So I had three solutions. And I laid out the solutions and said, here they are. One, two, three. I said, what do you want me to do? And he said, he thought for a second.
And he looked at me and he said, just go be Tom Mayer. That's why you are Tom Mayer. That's why I hired Tom Mayer. I realized what he was saying is, I trust you, trust yourself to be able to make the right decision and I'll support you all the way. You know, the leader we're looking for, the leader you're looking for is you. You are the one.
Well, that's true. Definitely. You know, I always talk about innovation at the speed of not genius, intelligence, creativity, but of trust. Because if people don't trust you, they're not going to step outside the lines and try something that might fail. We have to make failure our fuel. We have to understand that if you're not failing, you're not innovating.
You know, you're only adopting best practices, adopting what has already been identified maybe as the next phase, but it's something that's clearly there. You know, we want people to be able to think we're really completely outside the box. Most of the time when the boss says, think outside the box, they don't mean that. They mean think inside my box. Mm-hmm.
The way I'm thinking, guess what I'm thinking. So, that's like sucking up. So, the answers are not in, you know, they're not in the C-suite, they're in the we-suite. The people who do the work, the team of people who do the work in the trenches on a daily basis. And that's where innovation should come from.
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